Nicholas Thurkettle

The Princess and the Frog
Directors: Ron Clements & John Musker
Writers: Story by Ron Clements & John Musker and Greg Erb and Jason Oremland, Screenplay by Ron Clements & John Musker and Rob Edwards, based on the story The Frog Princess by Ed Baker; music and lyrics by Randy Newman
Producer: Peter Del Vecho
Featuring the Vocal Talents of: Anika Noni Rose, Bruno Campos, Keith David, Michael-Leon Wooley, Jennifer Cody, Jim Cummings, Peter Bartlett, Jenifer Lewis, Oprah Winfrey, Terrence Howard, John Goodman

I recognize what they’re doing – the broad humor and the good heart, the way colorful ink is made to imitate life, the fairy tale story that proudly wins its happy ending. It is familiar but shocking, because it makes you realize just how long it has been since you saw it. It’s Disney Animation.

This is not to say that the Walt Disney Transglobal Entertainment Conglompire has failed to put out cartoons in recent years. But it felt so distressingly like they hated their own legacy and character, like they had no confidence that children still worked the way they did even 15 years ago when The Lion King was enrapturing them. When the budgets and staffs were slashed, when spreadsheet-inspired sequels to classics were outsourced to quickie TV animators, and finally, when they announced that they were through with 2D hand-drawn animation, and would be switching entirely to digital like their competitors at Pixar and Dreamworks, I wondered why all these suited bigwigs could have such poor taste as to grin at a funeral.

But with Pixar heads John Lasseter and Ed Catmull brought in to take the reins of the animation studio that inspired them and so many other artists in its heydays, we have the privilege of watching this one corner of Disney re-discover, and re-embrace, its true nature. The Princess and the Frog might not rank in the masterpiece class of Disney’s long roll call of animated features – the format they essentially invented with 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – but it brings with it a palpable breath of joy. You get to see them remembering what they do, and that it feels good.
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Originally published 11/17/04

Ray
Director: Taylor Hackford
Writers: Screen story by Taylor Hackford and James L. White, screenplay by James L. White
Producers: Taylor Hackford, Stuart Benjamin, Howard Baldwin, Karen Elise Baldwin
Stars: Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Regina King, Sharon Warren, Clifton Powell, Bokeem Woodbine, Harry J. Lennix, Aunjanue Ellis, Curtis Armstrong, Richard Schiff, Larenz Tate

A movie and a life always make strange bedfellows; my gut call would be that there’s a lower ratio of excellent biopics than nearly any other genre in filmmaking. Sure, you have the attraction of a famous name, and the opportunity for award-friendly acting. But it’s hard finding defining emotional and dramatic shape in messy real lives. It’s even harder when the life in question is one so many people are invested in that there’s immense pressure to fit in all those highlights.

Ask yourself what a challenge it would be making one mix album to summarize Ray Charles, whose genius crossed so many genres and embraced so many stories and moods. The cumbersome weight of expectations throws Ray seriously off-balance. You are left learning a great deal about the life of the artist – in fact, most of what a good timeline would tell you. But after trying to jam in so much data, we leave strangely unenthralled despite the extraordinary efforts of Jamie Foxx in the title role.
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Originally published 11/2/04

Sideways
Director: Alexander Payne
Writers: Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, based on the novel by Rex Pickett
Producer: Michael London
Stars: Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen, Sandra Oh

Screenwriting gurus use a term called “petting the dog”, which is meant to remind writers to give their characters some action that humanizes them, so we in the audience will like them.

Sideways shows us a different application of this principle, we might call it “chugging the spit bucket.” Which means there’s got to be a lot to this warm, rambling charmer of a movie for us to like these characters. After all, how hard is it to like a guy who pets a dog?
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The Road
Director: John Hillcoat
Writers: Screenplay by Joe Penhall, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy
Producers: Nick Wechsler, Steve Schwartz, Paula Mae Schwartz
Stars: Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce

Viggo Mortensen’s performance in The Road is great because of all that the movie denies him. Withered and hoarse, he has such small spaces within which to suggest the human he used to be, covered as it is by what he has to be now. He says to his son: “I’ll shoot anyone who touches you; ‘cause it’s my job.” And under his absolute conviction he is able to show us his grief that life has become that simple, that the nearness of death has made his parental tunnel vision, in his mind, necessary. We believe he is not a ruthless man, but his love is now a ruthless love, and the way it has altered him provides the tension in this post-apocalyptic journey filmed from the pages of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

As movie apocalypses go this is one of the most thorough I have seen – even the innocent plants and animals were not spared. It’s a planet-wide cemetery; everything is decay and despair, and the only sound on the horizon is the sighing crash of another dead tree. Even their roots have given up. Director John Hillcoat used the primitive Australian Outback to mesmerizing effect in 2006’s The Proposition, and he realizes this bleak future just as capably.
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Originally published 11/1/04

Team America: World Police
Director: Trey Parker
Writers: Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Pam Brady
Producers: Scott Rudin, Matt Stone, Trey Parker
Starring the voices of: Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Kristen Miller, Masasa, Daran Norris, Phil Hendrie, Maurice LaMarche

-PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

-Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

It’s a dangerous, dangerous thing to assume that Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park and the brains/voices behind Team America: World Police, have any agenda beyond making you laugh.

Dumber and more hostile people than them have suggested that celebrities who speak out against war are giving aid to the enemy, which is exactly what happens in the movie. The catch is, the people who’ve suggested this have never been funny at it. And I doubt Parker and Stone really believe it. But I do think they consider it funny. And maybe it is inherently funny that famous actors believe they can change the world, but it can’t be discounted that the climax of the movie involves, well, good acting changing the world. And thus a clear message beyond universal mockery eludes us again.

I will not attempt to even guess at Parker and Stone’s politics, much less criticize them. My criticism is reserved solely for their humor.
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Originally posted 9/27/04

Shaun of the Dead
Director: Edgar Wright
Writers: Simon Pegg, Edgar Wright
Producer: Nira Park
Stars: Simon Pegg, Kate Ashfield, Nick Frost, Lucy Davis, Dylan Moran, Penelope Wilton, Bill Nighy

The Scream movies were labeled “post-modern” because the characters in them had seen horror movies and used them as a template for survival. Shaun of the Dead is a different kind of post-modern, because its success depends heavily on the audience having seen horror movies, particularly zombie movies. The characters have not seen zombie movies, and know nothing about survival except how much their preferred post-hangover victuals cost at the corner market.

This almost appallingly-amusing movie’s central joke is that there’s no thing too weird, say, for example, an apocalypse of the walking dead, that we as people couldn’t eventually filter into a background irritant. The inertia of the average low-watt slacker, we see, will always bring him back to his couch, television and beer.
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Saw VI
Director: Kevin Greutert
Writers: Screenplay by Patrick Melton & Marcus Dunstan
Producers: Mark Burg, Oren Koules, Gregg Hoffman
Stars: Tobin Bell, Costas Mandylor, Shawnee Smith, Betsy Russell, Peter Outerbridge, Mark Rolston, Athena Karkanis, Samantha Lemole

“I’m just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood”
     -The Animals

Machinery is what The Jigsaw Killer (Tobin Bell) specialized in during his life, and since the Saw franchise that chronicles his exploits has now succeeded in making three sequels after the death of its main character, it is fitting that those sequels feature machines he built or conceived of in life, that are still grinding thoughtlessly on without him. And Saw VI does feature a saw – by my recollection, every film in the series thus far has contained at least one, and you have to think they make sure of things like that.

I have seen all the Saw movies, originally created by director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell, and have not thought a single one good. But Saw VI, which shows the franchise out of ideas and beyond the threshold of self-parody, has a way of reflecting back on what few morsels of promise existed in the early movies. In hindsight they find themselves improved, now that I have seen how it is possible for them to be worse.
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Ninja Assassin
Director: James McTeigue
Writers: story by Matthew Sand, screenplay by Matthew Sand and J. Michael Straczynski
Producers: Grant Hill, Joel Silver, Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski
Stars: Rain, Naomie Harris, Shô Kosugi, Rick Yune, Ben Miles

The blood is very important. Any self-respecting movie that sets out to call itself Ninja Assassin is going to spill some blood, and you have to make a decision how that blood is going to look and behave. There are more options than you may have ever considered.

The movie before us is a product of the Matrix-making Wachowskis, their long-time champion/producer Joel Silver, and their apprentice director James McTeigue (who also helmed V for Vendetta for them), and with resumes like that you know they thought long and hard about the blood. What they settled on is garish, at the candy-colored end of the spectrum like in George Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead, and it does not squirt or spurt, but splashes and splatters. In our world the average human body contains 5-6 quarts of blood. In the world of this movie, characters carry a few extra quarts inside for visual dash.

Bodies get cleaved, sliced, diced and whipped. Bullets are boring when a ninja can make you burst open like a water balloon. The violence starts early and at full volume, and on the basis of its first startling fatality I can say I appreciate a genre movie that is not out to give you any illusions about the experience you are about to have. This movie is neither smarter than a dog nor deeper than a puddle, but you probably knew that beforehand.
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Originally published 9/20/04

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
Director: Kerry Conran
Writer: Kerry Conran
Producers: Jon Avnet, Marsha Oglesby, Sadie Frost, Jude Law
Stars: Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Giovanni Ribisi, Bai Ling, Michael Gambon, the late Lord Laurence Olivier

It takes a special breed of creative audacity to conceive of images for the screen that, if you made them look too realistic, they’d somehow look less believable. That’s the best way I can think to describe the visual splendor of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, any shot of which you could freeze and use as the cover for some thrilling adventure book; or hang on your wall, for that matter. If for nothing else, this movie deserves a view simply because you have never, in your life, seen anything quite like it.

The color is washed out into a semi-sepia toned look, the camera pitches and whirls around impossible sights like an aerial chase passing through a factory warehouse, or hundred-foot high robots marching in murderous rank down the streets of New York, or aircraft carriers hovering in the clouds on giant propellers. First-time writer/director Kerry Conran made the entire film using a unique and painstaking approach, shooting all of the actors on a bare blue stage, then literally “painting” the sets, action, even many of the extras, around them using a computer program he spent six years tweaking and testing. In a way, Sky Captain could be considered an animated film whose lead characters just happen to be filmed and inserted in, like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? in reverse. But Toontown had nothing on this.
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Originally published 9/13/04

Resident Evil: Apocalypse
Director: Alexander Witt
Writer: Paul W.S. Anderson, based upon the videogame by Capcom
Producers: Jeremy Bolt, Paul W.S. Anderson, Don Carmody
Stars: Milla Jovovich, Sienna Guillory, Oded Fehr, Thomas Kretschmann, Jared Harris, Sandrine Holt, Mike Epps, Sophie Vavasseur, Raz Adoti

I am asked to accept one of two remarkable possibilities. One: that the evil global conglomerate Umbrella Corporation managed, in a feat of hustle engineering that would have impressed the folks behind the Berlin Wall, to erect, in a matter of hours, massive high-tech barricades blocking every escape point from Raccoon City, which is a spitting image in both size and shape to Toronto.

The other possibility is that they had these barricades up already, and it must have been some story they spun for why they might someday be necessary. And I’m starting to wonder in what country this is all taking place. We worry in America about corporations being too powerful, too friendly with the government, more in control than we know. But I have my doubts that we’ve reached the point where a corporation could wall in an entire populace and start slaughtering them without hearing even a peep from the authorities.

Either way, Resident Evil: Apocalypse is a by-God disaster in the storytelling arena, and for perhaps the first time in movie history, a movie based on a video game proves clumsier and dumber in both pacing and plot detail than the actual video game.
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